Developers have manufactured different types of solid-state memory devices for storing digital data. These memory devices can be packaged into what is known as memory cards, which have increased in popularity in recent years. Memory cards are used in a variety of applications, such as in digital cameras and camcorders, music players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), personal computers, etc. These memory cards are typically very small in size and have specific physical specifications, or form factors. Typical memory cards have a data storage capacity in a range from about 2 megabytes (MB) to about 1 gigabyte (GB).
Although many memory cards provide large volumes of memory, the data transfer rate for storing large files into memory and retrieving files from memory are sometimes rather slow. For instance, if a photographer uses a digital camera that is capable of taking 5 pictures per second and if each picture includes about 5 MB of data, the memory card must be capable of storing data at a rate of at least 25 MB per second. Existing memory cards are not capable of such transfer rates. In another example, suppose the photographer stores about 100 pictures in memory and each picture is about 5 MB. Although the pictures may be stored on a 512 MB memory card, with a slow data transfer rate, it may take up to 20 minutes to upload the pictures into a computer.
One solution to the slow data transfer rate has been to supply the host devices (such as digital cameras) with large amounts of static random access memory (SRAM) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM). SRAM and DRAM are volatile memory and may act as data buffers for non-volatile memory devices. These data buffers temporarily store data as it is being written to the memory devices or read from the memory devices so that the data is not lost. However, because of the slow data transfer rate into the non-volatile memory devices, data may get backed up in the data buffers, preventing the user from storing additional information until the data is eventually stored in the non-volatile memory. Another problem with this solution is that SRAM and DRAM are relatively expensive and tend to drive up the cost of the host devices. Thus, a need exists in the industry to provide a higher performance, faster data transfer rate, and lower cost alternative to the SRAM and DRAM solution and to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.